NRC stocking up on machine guns and ammo

That doesn’t make 70,000 tons of nuclear waste go away.
So, it must be protected.

An 83 year old nun and a couple of her friends, waltzed right into Oak Ridge, no problem..
exposing the sorry state of the nation’s nuclear security.
It’s a friggin’ disgrace that they are going to throw her in jail over it.
Has to be revenge for the extreme embarassment they must be feeling.
I think she should get a medal for exposing the lax security at one of the nation’s most sensitive sites..

Anyway, a recent report from ORNL has determined that reprocessing in the US is unlikely,
so the best option is geological deposit.. `a la Yucca Mt., which is dead.

They have decided to find another place.. have given themselves about 30 years to decide.
20 years from now.. they will have generated another 40,000 tons of waste..

The nuclear operators were never required to find a permanent repository for the waste.
That was the responsibility of the government.
Great job, fellas..
They have had 50 years to come up with a plan.

While the rest of America spent January debating new gun control laws, one government agency announced its plans to expand the use of high-capacity magazines, assault weapons, and even fully automatic machine guns. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees the nation’s nuclear plants, is seeking the firepower not for securing the plants themselves, but to defend their nuclear waste.

Since America’s commercial reactors started opening in the 1960s and ’70s, nuclear waste has been piling up. At first, it was stored in spent fuel pools—swimming pools you’d never, ever want to swim in. That was fine for a time, but by the 1980s, the pools started to get crowded. So the utilities began putting old fuel rods in something they call dry cask storage, and I’ll call nuclear dumpsters. They’re big, they’re white, and they’re literally kept out back like the rest of the trash.

There’s little hope that the 70,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel dispersed across the United States will ever be recycled, according to a recent study by Oak Ridge National Laboratory—so nearly all existing waste will go into the earth.

In a study completed late last year, Oak Ridge officials determined that the U.S. is at least 20 years away from large-scale reprocessing of used nuclear fuel, if it decides to pursue such technologies. By then, they estimate, nuclear plants will have generated another 40,000 metric tons of spent fuel.

The United States’ current inventory of domestic used nuclear fuel “is massive, diverse, dispersed, and increasing,” according to the Oak Ridge report. Stored at 79 temporary sites in 34 states, it represents”a total of about 23 billion curies of long-lived radioactivity.”